Everyone enjoys playing around with their home’s décor, it’s fun, you get to be creative and best of all you have an even more beautiful home to enjoy once you’re done with it! But what people don’t like about playing around with décor is the credit card bill the next month.
Unless you’re a savvy shopper or know exactly what you want, redecorating can quickly run up a big bill as you buy all the bits and pieces you want for your home, which puts a lot of people off taking on new décor challenges. While I can’t help you know exactly what you want, I can help you be more savvy when shop around for décor pieces for your home.
So, today I’ll walk through some savvy choices you can make when shopping for décor pieces, I’ll focus on cheaper alternatives to common pricey pieces that are just as good as the real deal.
Avoid Real Wood Blinds
Our first ‘just as good’ alternative is Faux Wood Venetian blinds, which are a great stand in for Real Wood Venetian blinds.
Faux Wood Blinds use plastic slats rather than real wood, which helps slash the price of the blinds to a more affordable level and the plastic slats are designed to look exactly like real wooden slats, so unless someone touches the slats, they’ll never know the difference.
This swap still lets you get the look of having Real Wood Venetian blinds, but without having to pay the higher cost of using real wood!
Buy Art Prints Rather Than Art
Art has often been seen as a more expensive décor piece which leads a lot of people to avoid art as they don’t want to pay silly money for it.
But nowadays the world is filled up with printing companies who can make prints of anything for you at a fraction of the cost a real art piece would have, which makes art a lot more accessible and easier to use in your home’s décor, as you can pay £10 for a print rather than £10,000 for an original piece.
With custom prints, you can use any images you want, whether it’s the Mona Lisa or one of your little one’s drawings you’ll be able to get prints made cheaply and quickly.
Cover Up Unsightly Furniture
If you have a piece of furniture in your home that you don’t like, it can be tempting to get rid of it and replace it with something new.
But you don’t have to replace unsightly furniture when you can always cover it up, buying a nice sofa throw will be cheaper than a new sofa and buying a table cloth to cover up a table will be a lot cheaper than buying a new table.
Just by covering up, rather than replacing you can save a lot of money to help keep your decoration budget in check.
Use Fake Flowers
Flowers and plants are great to use for your home décor, but using real plants you can often end up spending a lot, as you need plants, pots and all the accessories to maintain them and if you’re not very green fingered, you’ll end up spending more replacing dead plants.
This is where fake flowers come into play, you can easily find fake plants that look just like the real deal, often they’re a lot cheaper than it would be for a real plant and as an added bonus, you don’t need to remember to water fake plants.
So by buying a few fake plants for your home, you can save yourself a lot of time and money.
Use LED Strips For Floor Lighting
In recent years, floor lighting has become a trend in the décor world, while usually you’d need to get light built into your floor, you can use LED strips to get floor lighting in your home.
Floor lights can start out from £20, so having them built into your floor would be expensive, but you can buy five metres of LED light strips online for about £20 which makes them the more budget friendly option.
To use the LED strip lights, all you need to do is lay them around the edges of any room and just like that you have high quality floor lighting.
Refresh Rather Than Replace
When it comes to furniture buying new is always going to be expensive, which is why you should try to refresh rather than replace.
For wooden furniture that needs a bit of TLC, you can make it look brand new by simply sanding the rough edges and then painting or staining the wood, which should be quite cheap especially when compared to buying new furniture.
If your wooden furniture is beyond repair, you can still save money by buying second hand wooden furniture and then painting it to make it look brand new – whatever you do, it’ll be a lot cheaper than replacing it with a new piece.
Use Vinyl Flooring Rather Than Wood
As we mentioned earlier using wood in your décor can be quite expensive, this remains true with flooring.
Wooden flooring can cost quite a lot of money, but vinyl flooring is a great alternative that is far more budget friendly. With vinyl flooring you can still get the look of real wooden flooring but at a fraction of the cost.
And as vinyl can have patterns and designs printed on it, you can opt for anything your heart desires rather than just wood.
Go Vintage
If you’re not fussed about things needing to be brand new, it’s worth checking out antique shops and vintage marketplaces for furniture and décor pieces.
Just by shopping around vintage marketplaces, you can find awesome unique furniture and décor pieces for a lot cheaper than they would be new and they’ll probably be better made and last longer than buying new mass produced flat pack furniture.
It may take time to find what you’re looking for, but shopping vintage will more often than not leave you with a better deal than buying new.
Stay Out Of IKEA
IKEA is great, I have nothing against IKEA… But buying from IKEA can be very expensive for flatpack furniture.
This doesn’t mean that you need to avoid flatpack furniture to save money, but more often than not IKEA tend to be one of the more pricey brands for flatpack furniture. Instead of defaulting to IKEA look around for cheaper flatpack companies who can do it cheaper.
Don’t worry about quality, as it’s flatpacked the quality should be the same no matter what retailer you buy from, but the price won’t!
And there you have it, a long list of great budget friendly décor alternatives which are just as good (if not better) than the real thing, which should make refreshing your home’s décor a lot easier and a loooooot less stressful.
Hopefully this has been a nice reminder that expensive doesn’t always mean better and that you can make your dream home a reality, no matter what your budget is.
Do you have any smart Décor alternatives that you’ve used before? Let us know what it was and how it worked out for you
